We didn't get a TV until 1984 when I was 9 years old. My mother was Pentecostal (UPC), and they were against owning TVs, and even against watching TV at all. Fortunately my mother wasn't terribly strict about the latter part, so when we visited other people, us kids were allowed to watch TV, as long as my mother didn't find anything particularly offensive about whatever show that was on.
The first TV show that ever really made an impression on me was The Dukes of Hazzard, which I first watched at my Uncle Herb's house when I was 4 years old (1979). With regard to my mother's approval, this was a borderline show, because she wasn't impressed with Daisy Duke's "skimpy outfits", but she let it slide anyway.
On Friday nights we'd usually either go to Bangor or we'd visit Uncle Herb and Aunt Gracy, so I got to watch DoH on a fairly regular basis, and soon became infatuated with the car (the General Lee).
In 1982 (2nd grade for me) there was a rumor going around school that there was a General Lee down at the local junk yard, which was going to be crushed soon. I hounded my father for two weeks to take me down there to see it, and finally he agreed. Floyd (the junkyard owner), my father, and I all walked down back into the junkyard, and there it was, the second car up in a pile of cars stacked one atop the other about 6 cars high. I just stared at it in awe: the bright orange paint, the glorious body lines of the 2nd generation Dodge Charger, the big "01" on the door. I didn't say anything, other than to ask why it had to be crushed. Floyd was very matter-of-fact about it. I don't remember what he said exactly, but I couldn't understand how he could place such little value on something so amazing to me. To him it was just another junk car.
I never got over my love of 2nd generation Dodge Chargers, 1969s in particular. I still consider them to have the best looking body style of any car ever made (with the Ferrari 308 being a close second). So in 1994 I bought one, two actually. One of them was an R/T and the other was a parts car for it. They were both cheap, and they were both basket cases. The parts car had the remnants of an old General Lee "uniform", and had been jumped through the air at one time. The damage from the jump is still visible on the front subframe rails and in the engine compartment, even though someone did some frame straightening and rewelding of some factory welds that had broken during the nose-forward landing. The story, told to me by the owner as an unverifiable anecdote after I'd already bought the car, was that the guy he bought it from told him that he bought it from someone who worked on one of the mechanic crews for The Dukes of Hazzard.
As it turned out, my dreams were much bigger than my wallet, and eventually I sold the R/T without ever getting anything done to it. However, the "parts car" sat in the Maine woods behind the garage where I'd stored the R/T, and it sat there for 17 years, until the spring of 2011 when I decided to bring it home and see what I could do with it. This is what it looked like just before I dragged it out of the woods:
After replacing minor tuneup parts (points, plugs, distributor cap, etc.) it fired right up and ran good (tough old 318 in it). However, the body, brakes, and suspension needed a lot of work. I worked on it all summer, with a lot of help from my mechanic friend that owns a garage in town, replacing the entire brake system, completely rebuilding the frontend, and cutting out rust and replacing with new steel:
The car is far from pretty, but it is solid now, runs good, and is completely roadworthy. Making it pretty will cost a ton, and I'll need to spread it out over several years. I'm not a fan of those wheels; they were on it when I got the car in '94. I have a set of aluminum turbine-style wheels that I got for free last fall that I'm going to put on the car in a few days (when the lugnuts I need for them arrive in the mail). They are similar to the American Racing and Shelby "Vector" wheels used on the show, but they have 14 fins/spokes instead of 10. They'll do for now, but eventually I want the "correct" wheels. I doubt I'll put General Lee graphics on the car (right now it still has the faded remnants of the flag on the roof), but when I get to the point of painting it, I'll probably keep it orange.
